Situating Derrida: Between Kierkegaard and Hegel

Abstract

This essay presents an interpretation of Derrida's project, and has two main goals. First, I argue that Derrida's work is best approached through concepts of questioning, metaphysics, complication, trembling, and insecurity. Second, using these concepts I situate Derrida's work historically. In literature, there are four main interpretations of Derrida's project: literary (Rorty, Habermas), Kantian (Gasche), Nietzschean (Behler), and Kierkegaardian (Caputo). I find myself in greatest agreement with last, and argue that Derrida's anti-system is an articulated aporetics.1 course there are other historical reference points for situating Derrida, most obvious being Heidegger. In course of my argument, I will discuss Derrida's proximity to Heidegger, but these references will lead back past Heidegger to Hegel. Thus, at most general level of interpretation, at which this essay will deal, I argue that because Derrida pursues a more persistent and consistent aporetics than Kierkegaard, we find Derrida's project situated between Kierkegaard and Hegel. My point in suggesting that Derrida's work can best be conceived as a Kierkegaardian meditation on Hegel is not in any way to dismiss Derrida as in some way out of date. On contrary, I believe that Derrida provides an original and profound metaphilosophical position, one which offers a third possible response to philosophical questions. In addition to traditional attempts to provide answers (whether of a straightforward or transcendental kind) to philosophical and Wittgensteinian attempts to dissolve philosophical questions, deconstruction provides a completely new approach, that of complicating philosophical questioning. Questions Without Answers One of most disconcerting aspects of Derrida's texts is that although they are rife with questions and problems, mentioned and discussed as such, no answers or solutions are offered. One comes across the question of text, the question of writing, the question of language, the problem of metaphor, the question of machine, the question of margin, the question of ontological subordination, the question of history, to name just a few. If one expects answers to these questions, then one becomes bewildered and frustrated. To expect an to these is naive, and naive is one of Derrida's key pejorative terms. Derrida says in The Pit and Pyramid with regard to which cannot be used to clarify question of (signification of the) relationship between signs and truth: Formulated this way, would be stated naively, presupposing or anticipating an answer. Here we are reaching a limit (p. 81) Derrida does not mean that presuppose a specific answer; rather, they presuppose that there is some answer, any at all. Derrida never answers multitude of and problems he addresses because he believes that they cannot be answered. This is an elementary point, perhaps too elementary to be mentioned. it is absolutely crucial, so citations are in order. Only occasionally, but nevertheless distinctly, Derrida says that he is posing can't be answered. In 'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology, he says: The question of possibility of transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer (p. 167). At beginning of Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy, he says: But I must forewarn you right now: (hi)stories or enigmas of translation I hear spoken of, that I intend to speak about, and that I shall get myself entangled in for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit (p. 25). Each of these claims refers only to under discussion in particular essay at that point, but point is generally true. Travel length and breadth of Derrida's philosophical work and one never finds that questions and problematics named and discussed as such are answered or solved (by, say, propounding of theories), no doubt because Derrida believes that they cannot be solved or answered. …